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The Trump Defense Agenda

One day after the Navy released its fiscal year 2018 budget request, which included one Littoral Combat Ship, a top service official said Wednesday the Navy, backed by the White House, "supports funding" an additional LCS.

The once-secretive Strategic Capabilities Office is seeking $1.1 billion -- the second largest unclassified pot of research and development funding in the Defense Department's fiscal year 2018 budget -- to develop new, and the Pentagon hopes, surprising ways of using existing systems to bolster conventional deterrence against China and Russia.

The Air Force's fiscal year 2018 budget request, released this week, offers a window into how much money the service needs to smooth out hundreds of issues plaguing an upgrade to the Air Operations Center war planning system.

The Air Force's fiscal year 2018 budget request proposes a $4.5 billion increase to its Next-Generation Air Dominance program over the next five years -- potentially lending momentum to the service's lengthy effort to develop a follow-on to the F-22.

The Defense Department is seeking funding for two significant missile defense initiatives in fiscal year 2018: a project to develop a defense against hypersonic weapons and field a warning capability by 2019 as well as an effort develop new a space-based sensor.

The Defense Department's fiscal year 2018 budget is accompanied by a "placeholder" forecast that assumes no real growth over five years, a blueprint the Pentagon expects to update with the FY-19 budget proposal next year to reflect the results of a Trump administration-led defense strategy review, according to a senior DOD official.

The Defense Department is seeking funding for two significant missile defense initiatives in fiscal year 2018: a project to develop a defense against hypersonic weapons and field a warning capability by 2019 as well as a new experiment to launch a missile interceptor from space, picking up a project championed by the Bush administration and abandoned by the Obama administration.

The Defense Department is requesting $574.5 billion in base spending for fiscal year 2018 and $64.5 billion in Overseas Contingency Operations funding, which in total include $208.6 billion in acquisition spending on major weapon systems, according to documents released by the Pentagon.

The Air Force's $132 billion fiscal year 2018 base budget seeks a slight boost to F-35 procurement, funding for studies and planning for new fighter and unmanned platforms and “maximizes” production capacity for key munitions.

Budget tables released Monday by the White House Office of Budget and Management indicate the Trump administration's fiscal year 2018 defense budget is actually a placeholder for the FY-19 strategy that won't be submitted until February at the earliest.

The Trump administration will propose increasing the Pentagon's investment spending to more than $200 billion in fiscal year 2018 -- raising investment on weapons to levels not seen since FY-12, according to a leaked spreadsheet of the FY-18 spending proposal.

Defense intelligence officials need to learn from Russia's efforts in Syria and Ukraine and apply similar integration efforts in an aim to maintain superiority in the future, according to President Trump's nominee to be principal deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence.

The chairwoman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee said Thursday Congress stands ready to change President Trump's fiscal year 2018 budget, which will propose a $54 billion increase in defense spending offset by a commensurate cut in non-defense funds.

The nominee to become the Pentagon's next comptroller concedes that use of the Overseas Contingency Operations account has become "complicated," but told lawmakers this week he believes any shortcomings cannot be addressed until Congress repeals the spending caps mandated by the 2011 Bipartisan Budget Act.

Foreign adversaries are using cyberspace to threaten physical harm to the nation's critical infrastructure -- from power plants to hospitals to transportation systems -- with increasingly sophisticated attacks that take advantage of emerging technologies and vulnerabilities from the Internet of Things, according to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.